The Trolley Dodger

Friend of Trolley Dodger, editor of the Daily Mirror blog at the LA Times, and all-around nice guy Larry Harnisch honored for heroism. Well done, Larry!

“D.A. honors three Good Samaritans for courageous acts”

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley honored two Good Samaritans on Wednesday for intervening during a 2007 assault on a woman in front of the Pasadena police station and a young boy for assisting authorities in a separate gang murder case.

Quoleshna Elbert, 31, and Larry Harnisch, 58, a Los Angeles Times copy editor, were given Courageous Citizen Awards during a ceremony at the Pasadena Hilton. The award honors those who act at “considerable personal risk to help a victim, capture a suspect or who have testified in court.” [...]

Elbert was on her way to church when she saw a woman being beaten by her ex-husband as her children looked on from the father’s car. She tried to stop the attack by hitting him with her purse and a Bible.

Harnisch was driving to church when he saw the attack, stopped his car and intervened, putting himself between the attacker and the victim, who had been beaten unconscious. The woman survived but suffered permanent injuries.

The actions of the pair — and their court testimony — helped prosecutors convict the man of attempted voluntary manslaughter, aggravated mayhem and torture. He was sentenced to six years to life in prison.

Following up on the recent Steve Lopez post, “How to generate hits in these troubled times”, Lopez announced his tickets were going to be awarded to a local firefighter. Of course. The winning entry:

“Dear Manny,” wrote Richard MacPhee, “I am a firefighter for the USFS, I make $16 an hour. It’s hot, dirty, dangerous, with long hours. My body hurts all the time. It takes four years to make $170,000. My bonus, somebody telling me ‘Thanks for the hard work.’ You should try it some time.”

No offense to Mr. MacPhee, and thanks to him for his service, but I’ll bet Lopez makes quite a bit more than $16 an hour for doing less physically taxing labor than a member of the Dodger marketing department, much less Manny Ramirez, and whose greatest claim to fame is writing and selling somebody else’s story. As Jon Weisman pointed out,

Ramirez might well loaf from time to time, but overall his work ethic is pretty legendary. I’m not saying that to whitewash the mistakes he has made. But there is no shortage of stories about the effort he has put into the game. He did not float to the top of the baseball echelon. He’s no firefighter, but if Ramirez doesn’t work as hard as MacPhee, he still has worked plenty hard.

Barring some unlikely direct reply from Lopez, I’m letting this go for now — I’m looking forward to Game 1 tomorrow and would rather concentrate on the positives of this entire team and their amazing season. Something I wish Lopez had done himself.

1. Pick a topic that will cause controversy. Say, Manny Ramirez’s drug suspension.
2. Come up with a gimmick to bring in the links and hits. Say, “…I’m giving my World Series tickets this year to the person who writes my favorite 50-word sermon to Ramirez.”
3. Get Bill Plaschke to ghost-write your column for you.
4. Edit Bill’s first draft to increase the moral indignation and delete some of the carriage returns.
5. Publish column and watch the hits roll in.

I would expect more out of Steve Lopez. Unfortunately, he decided to take the easy way out. Loafing his way across the outfield, as it were.

Maybe it’s the vicodin talking, but this whole scheme strikes me as insincere. If you felt that bad about buying those tickets (and somehow calculating you were supporting Manny by doing so), how about donating those tainted tickets to be auctioned off for charity? You could even make it a steroid-awareness organization if you felt like making a real statement.

Think about how much of a bigger splash you could have made by doing things that way. You’d get all kinds of press online and in the real world. Plus you’d be making a difference about a cause that you apparently care a lot about. And getting even more of those precious hits and links.

Something to mull over in the next columnist meeting.